Standalone point-of-use device for gluten detection in food: POCT application experiment in SMARTER-SI european project

Here we present a standalone point-of-use immunosensor device for food safety. Gluten was used as reference allergen to develop and test the device. Celiac disease is a gluten-sensitive enteropathy and one of the most common autoimmune disease affecting 1% of individuals in Europe

According to the international food standards, to label a food as gluten-free, it must contain less than 20mg/kg of gluten (20ppm). And according to the same standard, the method to detect the amount of gluten must have a detection limit of 10ppm.

In this work, we present an automatic and standalone microfluidic-based immunosensor to detect food allergens for food safety. The system has been developed as an application experiment in the SMARTER-SI European project. It comprises a microfluidic cartridge fabricated in cyclic olefin polymer by injection molding, the fluidic components to drive the reagents, two alternative optical detection systems based on fluorescent or colorimetric detection, respectively, and the electronics to manage all the components. As a proof-of-concept, gluten was immunodetected in a sandwich format by using R5 monoclonal antibody as capturing and detector probe. Gluten -antibody binding was revealed by using R5 mAb labelled to Alexa Fluor 647 or conjugated to horseradish peroxidase (HRP) for the fluorescence or the colorimetric version, respectively. Gluten were assayed at different concentrations from 50 to 0.1ppm. After 3minutes of developing and incubation, it appears to be capable to discriminate the intensity signals from a gluten concentration range between 1 and 50 ppm.